WorldCargo News Online

CARGO HANDLING
WorldCargo
news
Left: the new cranes and shuttle carriers have
led to a dramtic improvement in productivity
and lines are calling with bigger ships and
making more exchanges. The picture on the
right shows the buffer storage area
ture with TrackWheel, a previous Kalmar
dealer, to supply and maintain the cargo
handling equipment. SP Satria is the exclusive
supplier of port equipment to
Sabah Ports and also the exclusive agent
for Kalmar and Gottwald in Sabah.
SP Satria aims to provide services not
just to Sabah Ports but eventually to other
ports in Malaysia and the south east Asian
region.The Suria Group has a one year
consultancy agreement with Kalmar Asia
under which Kalmar will train SP Satria’s
maintenance and operational staff. Malay
speaking engineers from Kalmar Singa-
pore have been training around 80 SP
Satria service personnel on site and some
have been sent to Kalmar training centres
in Shekou and Finland. ❏
be managed by reach stackers and SP
Satria is finalising an order for 14 machines
with Kalmar. Stacking capacity is
the main reason for selecting reach stackers
and they are expected to be sufficient
until throughput hits 300,000 TEU, at
which point RTGs will be considered.
Throughput at Kota Kinabalu grew 2%
to 142,000 TEU last year, so the switch is
some way off.
With no shuttle carriers required for
yard work, only five of the seven machines
will be taken to Sepangar Bay; the other
two will be used at other terminals in the
Suria Group. Some of the straddle carriers
may be transferred elsewhere as well
or else sold off. This is Ahmat’s preference
as many are very old and they are
being phased out anyway.
Other systems being implemented at
Sepangar Bay include Cosmos operating
software and a new billing module being
developed by Suria Group’s IT subsidiary
Tricubes Suria Sdn Bhd.The Cosmos
TOS will replace the existing system developed
by Malaysia’s Portrade.
Training and maintenance
Sabah Ports has met lines’ requirements
for 15 moves per hour but recognised it
needed to improve driver behaviour and
maintenance to sustain and improve this
over time.A subsidiary company, SP Satria
Sdn Bhd, has been set up in a joint ven-
Sabah irony
There is no small irony that the biggest
application for shuttle carriers so far is in
harness with tractor/trailer sets (IMVs)
and not a replacement for them!
As originally conceived for high
throughput container terminals in northern
Europe, the shuttle carrier is a “short
circuit” interface between the quay cranes
and the shipside end of an automated container
stack that is aligned transversally to
the quay. Shuttle carriers are not good
“running mates” for RTG stacks, however
they are aligned, because the conventional
road lane is not wide enough
for two machines to pass.
Depending on design, number ordered
, etc, a “ballpark” price for a shuttle
carrier is thought to work out at around
2.5 times the price of an IMV, but it probably
needs to replace only two IMVs to
be cost-effective because of the saving in
manpower.
If one adds the productivity bonus of
breaking the handling chain at both the
stack and quayside interfaces compared
to a conventional IMV yard-quay dray,
the cost:benefit ratio looks likely to favour
the shuttle carrier even more.
The drawbacks are machine complexity
and higher costs for maintenenace
and service, along with driver training issues,
possible restrictions on wheel loads
and the general “unfamiliarity” with straddle
carriers in many RTG terminals.
One way to reduce deadweight is to
cut the shuttle carrier down to 1 over 0
or 1 over chassis size This reduces flexibility.
In the early days of shuttle carrier
concepts, there were outline designs for
these lower height versions, but interest
in them waned.
However, there is evidence that interest
has increased again, as “niche” machines
for low throughput operations inland
as well as portside. Kalmar, Noell,
CVS and Consens are all believed to have
some interesting designs on the way. ❏
April 2006 19